Ah, 24 December — and you know what that means, don’t you? Yes, of course: at midnight, cattle across the land will kneel down in their stalls and groan in memory of Jesus.
Apparently, this used to be a widely believed bit of folklore, and John Brand’s Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain says someone in Cornwall once tested it (even if Brand himself had to suppress his mirth):
An honest countryman, living … near Launceston … informed me … that he once, with some others made trial of the truth of the above, and watching several oxen in their stalls at the above time, at twelve o’clock at night, they observed the two oldest oxen only fall on their knees, and as he expressed it, in the idiom of the country, make ‘a cruel moan like Christian creatures’. I could not but with great difficulty keep my countenance: he saw this, and seemed angry that I gave so little credit to his tale, and walking off in a pettish humour seemed to ‘marvel at my unbelief’.
This is quoted in Steve Roud’s The English Year, a round-up of customs, festivals and folklore “from May Day to Mischief Night”, and he writes that Brand thought the idea came from popular prints of the Nativity.
Perhaps the best bit about this story, though, is that Bentley’s magazine in 1847 suggested that cattle could not only contemplate the eternal, they were also aware of the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
The kneeling of cattle is not the only Christmas tale Roud debunks, although I must say I found the dismissal of this one a little disappointing:
Still, on this day in 1954, Noël Coward sat down at home in Jamaica and wrote this in his diary:
Oh how nice it would be, just for today and tomorrow, to be a little boy of five instead of an ageing playwright of fifty-five and look forward to all the high jinks with passionate excitement and be given a clockwork train with a full set of rails and a tunnel. However, it is no use repining. As things are, drink will take the place of parlour games and we shall all pull crackers and probably enjoy ourselves enough to warrant at least some of the god-damned fuss.
The news from home is mainly concerned with disaster, floods and gales and houses collapsing. I am very lucky to be here in the warmth and so I will crush down the embittered nausea which the festive season arouses in me and plunge into gaiety with an adolescent whoop.
